Social media as a scientific research tool: Background info for my #scio14 session

At the 2014 ScienceOnlineTogether conference, I will be moderating a session focusing on how to use social media as a scientific research tool (2:30 P.M. on Friday, February 28th in room 3). The hashtag is #ScioResearch , so be sure to follow along, and I’ll make a Storify afterwards. This post is primarily intended to be a source of background information for participants in my session, though feel free to read, share and ask questions in the comments if you are not planning on participating in my session.

ScienceOnline community members understand the value of social media for collaborating with colleagues and communicating science to the public, but few think of the incredible resource that these tools are for scientific research. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world are constantly sharing their experiences and opinions in a format that is public, archived, searchable, and accessible, giving researchers access to this enormous dataset without the expense or logisitical difficulties involved in organizing a large-scale survey or series of focus groups. To use a technical term, for many types of scientific research, social media and “big data” is what is called “a freakin’ gold mine.”

Below are a few examples of how social media can be used for scientific research.

Figure 1 from Binder et al. 2012., showing the number of tweets about nuclear power mentioning the associated risks over time.

Geology:Social media can be used to track events such as earthquakes. When people experience a natural disaster like an earthquake, they are likely to tweet about it. An algorithm was developed to estimate the origin of the earthquake based on the frequency of tweets in different geographic areas, and it was remarkably similar to data generated by geologists.

Figure 9 from Sakaki et al. 2010, showing how close the actual earthquake center (red X) is to what was estimated by tweets (green crosses)

The right-most column is “any of the 10 solutions for sustainable fisheries management outlined in the International Plan of Action for Sharks”

In the session I’m moderating, we’ll discuss examples of social media being used for scientific research, as well as advantages and disadvantages of this tool and strategies for success. I hope to see many of you there!